And that, by and large, was that, apart from the legalistic regularisation of the situation into one analogous with Nigeria, the setting up of a “British Crown Colony and Protectorate”.
Until 1971, when the Colonial Office in London was seeking ways of disposing of its last few embarrassing overseas charges. Some, like the smallest Pacific islands, were pretty well hopeless cases, and the best that could be managed was to shuffle them off into someone else’s lap—the Australians’, for example. Beninia did not look at first as though it would pose the least difficulty, however. After all, Gambia, which was about the same size, had been independent for a few years already.
The trouble arose when they tried to find someone to hand over the government to.
There were a good few competent officials in Beninia, but owing to the fact that the Muslim pattern of paternalism conformed to the masculinist prejudices of nineteenth-century English public-school boys, most of them had been recruited among the northern minority, the Holaini. Exactly the same thing had happened in Nigeria. There, following independence, the majority group had revolted against this legacy of Victorian prejudice. The Colonial Office had no wish to repeat that mistake, even though the Shinka seemed to be peculiarly unpolitical. In fact, if they’d had the kindness to organise a proper political party to agitate for independence, the problem would never have arisen.
Casting around, the London bureaucrats hit on a young Beninian who, if he didn’t have a popular following, at least enjoyed popular esteem. Zadkiel Frederick Obomi had been educated in Britain and the United States. He came from a respectable, moderately well-to-do family. His ambition was to become an educational broadcaster, and he was doing jack-of-all-trades work at the only TV station serving the Bight area—lecturing, reading news bulletins, and commenting on current affairs in Shinka and Holaini. He had been seconded to supervise the news coverage of the last meeting of the Organisation for African Unity, and the delegates from Ethiopia and South Africa had both singled him out for praise, so there was no question of his acceptability outside Beninia.
Inside the country it was a different matter, chiefly because he himself had never thought of being president. Eventually, however, he was persuaded that no one else was qualified, and when his name was put to a plebiscite both Shinka and Holaini voters approved him by a thumping majority over a candidate backed largely by Egyptian funds.
Thankfully the British re-named Governor’s House, calling it the Presidential Palace, and went home.
At first, owing to inexperience, the new president seemed to be bumbling along. His first cabinet, chosen in ratio to the population of Holaini versus Shinka with a slight bias towards the former because of their administrative background, accomplished practically nothing. Bit by bit, however, he replaced the British-trained ministers with people of his own choosing, some of whom volunteered to come home from comfortable foreign posts, like the incumbent minister of finance, Ram Ibusa, who had been teaching economics in Accra.
To everyone’s surprise, he coped well with a crisis that threatened him at the very end of his first term.
In former British and French colonies adjacent to Beninia, a commonplace feature of late twentieth-century Africa broke out—tribal quarrels flared up into rioting and sometimes a week or two of actual civil war. Large movements of Inoko and Kpala took place. Since Beninia was handy, and since it wasn’t in turmoil, both tribes’ refugees headed for there.
The people who had kicked them out weren’t interested in what had become of them. It was only later, after the economic facts of life had forced several ex-colonial countries to federate into groups sharing a common European language—such as Mali, Dahomey and Upper Volta into Dahomalia, and Ghana and Nigeria into RUNG—that they became aware of a curious phenomenon.
The Shinka were even poorer than the Inoko and the Kpala, and might have been expected to resent the extra burden the refugees placed on the country’s strained resources. But they had demonstrated no hostility. On the contrary, a generation of foreigners had been raised in Beninia who seemed perfectly contented and immune to all suggestions about insisting that their lands be incorporated with their original home nations.
Almost as though they regarded Obomi with the traditional awe accorded to his “magician” ancestors, the neighbouring giants seesawed back and forth between placation and aggression. The latter usually set in when some internal disorder made the invocation of an outside enemy desirable; the former was rarer, and only followed the intrusion of a common rival from elsewhere. Allegedly the German soldier of fortune whose bungled assassination attempt cost Obomi his eye had been hired and paid in Cairo. The resultant hostility among the Holaini against the notion of Pan-Islam decided the Arab world to return to its accustomed railing about Israel.
But now the long-time calm of Beninia seemed likely to be shattered for good. If a succession dispute followed Obomi’s retirement, the jealous neighbours would certainly pounce. The intervention of GT might prevent the war. Shalmaneser had reviewed the various hypothetical outcomes and given his quasi-divine opinion.
Yet Norman kept being nagged by doubt. After all, Shalmaneser could only judge on the basis of the data he was fed; suppose Elihu had allowed his love for Beninia to colour his views with optimism, and this had affected the computer’s calculations?
It seemed absurdly sanguine to suggest turning a poverty-stricken, famine- and sickness-ridden ex-colony into a bridgehead of prosperity within twenty years. Why, there wasn’t even a university, not even a major technical school—nothing better than a privately financed business school in Port Mey from which the government already skimmed the cream of the graduates.
Of course, they did claim that all the country’s male children acquired a minimum of literacy and numeracy, and a grounding in English as well as one other of their country’s tongues. And there was no disrespect for education in Beninia—they were even shorter of truants than of teachers. Eagerness to learn might make up for a good few deficiencies in other areas.
Might …
Sighing, Norman gave up worrying. The exclamation-mark shape of Beninia might twist on the map into an imagined question-posing curl, but that was in his mind. The facts were in the real world, and he was acutely aware how he had systematically isolated himself from reality.
* * *
He said as much to Chad Mulligan, on one of the increasingly rare occasions when he was at home long enough to spend a few minutes in talking. The sociologist’s heart had not proved to be in his intention to debauch himself to his grave; habit unweakened by three years in the gutter had dragged him back into familiar patterns of study and argument.
His response to Norman’s remark began with a grimace of disgust. “What you’re up against, codder, is the intractability of the outside world! Okay, I sympathise—I have the same trouble. I can’t keep enough liquor in my guts to rot them the way I planned. Before I pass out, I throw up! So what’s making you so angry with Beninia, hm?”
“Not the country itself,” Norman sighed. “The fact that nobody seems to have noticed this weird anomaly of a whole nation sitting on the edge of a political volcano and hardly getting singed.”
“With a volcanic eruption in progress, whoinole is going to take time out and wonder about folk who are getting on with their ordinary business?” Chad grunted. “Why don’t you save the guesswork until you’ve been there and seen for yourself? When are they sending you over, by the way?”